Show Business: Comediva

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Off-Broadway's 41st Street Theater is about 25 ft. underground and is closer to Broadway than many so-called Broadway theaters. Hold on there, Ripley, don't go away. You should see the show that is currently playing there.

One woman—middle-aged, with a look that suggests the principal of a girls' day school—performs by herself for two hours. Her name is Anna Rus sell. Her show is called All by Myself, and the box office is selling tickets into August. She is a musical parodist and jokeratura who mocks every conceivable kind of composer, singer and singing style. Her audience comes in two varieties—devoted sectarians, who howl, giggle, and shake with uncontrollable mirth, and innocent theatergoers, who sit dumfounded.

Sexy Castanets. Posing as a ladies' club president, Anna Russell introduces a series of performers, all of whom turn out to be herself. "Deep down within every one of us there is something stagnant that is dormant," she says. Across the footlights, the sect guffaws. "I do want you to give our artist a welderful wuncum," she pleads. The sect shrieks.

As the artist, Russell puts on a choirboy's cape and sings a madrigal about death with her eyes crossed. Moments later she is a torch singer, plainting about That Man she loves:

He comes home such a sorehead

When he's been on a spree,

Yet the eye in the middle of his forehead

Is beautiful to me.

With a plastic rose in her teeth, she is suddenly Carmen, doing the Habanera as an English patter song, clicking castanets. "I have to get these adjusted," she says of the castanets. "One is male and the other female. To me, they look much alike, but perhaps you are more discerning than I am."

Warrior Hair. A strong woman with battlement bones and swept-back warrior hair, Anna was born in London in 1911. Her family was a conservative phalanx of British army officers. In that stratum, "you resigned the regiment if you wanted to marry an actress," she says. No one wanted an actress daughter either, so Anna was trained as a serious musician. She did not turn to comedy and show business until she was 31.

She writes all her own material, and the people who are attracted to it now are very often serious musicians. Pale cellists and fat sopranos sit in her audiences and variously twang and chortle. In London recently, after a performance in which she parodied the Ring of the Nibelung, the massed Valkyries of Covent Garden went round back stage and presented her with a bust of Wagner.